Crazy Stone v1.1 was released a few days ago with a new Engine Server Game option. According to the app description:



The subscription costs $2.63 per month. The description also lists a slew of the bot's achievements in 2013, including beating Ishida Yoshio in a 4 stone handicap game on 20 March 2013.

I think this could be an exciting option and I will probably subscribe in a month or two when I have more time for serious games. Has anyone subscribed to test the strength of the engine yet?

Edit- Should have mentioned that this is Android as seen on Google Play

The server option has been there for a good while on iOS. From what I remember what you get is a shared server on the other end. People weren't sure if it'd be a bit weaker or a bit stronger than a decent desktop machine at home but I don't think anyone thought it'd be a good deal stronger. It should be an awful lot stronger than your phone hardware though!

It's cheaper than buying the desktop version, (though not as pretty) and I take it more seriously than the regular phone/tablet bot (and it's stronger) so I'm liking it a lot right now.

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I am John. John-I-Am.

I use crazy stone on my tablet very often (and I like it very much), but it's usually in locations where I don't have connection (during flights or at sea).

My problem is that the crazy stone app is too big for my phone. I'll try to contact the author to suggest him to make a lite micro app that only allows the "play vs server" option with minimal options (difficulty, board size, b/w, handicap, and little more). I'd very happily subscribe to that.

Whether there could be strong enough hardware for this service depends on a lot of variables like:

a) how many games would each subscriber play per month (on average)
b) what would be the time control (how long to play a game)
c) intended to make serious money or just modest profits above breaking even.

The point here is that while serious crunch power needed, the machines being the hardware (the game servers) don't need much else in the box. Don't need fancy video chips, large hard drives, not even huge amounts of memory. A lot has changed in the last year or two and if you look at crunch benchmarks you'd see that an i7-2600 or i7-3370 (and these are not very expensive chips) would be around half as powerful as the most powerful hardware being used for go bots in tournaments (because several years older CPUs designed for other things than pure crunch).